Obviously,
there's a grey area here, because there's a wide range of things that players
care about. So how will we identify these off-topic review bombs? The first step
is a tool we've built that identifies any anomalous review activity on all games
on Steam in as close to real-time as possible. It doesn't know why a given game
is receiving anomalous review activity, and it doesn't even try to figure that
out. Instead, it notifies a team of people at Valve, who'll then go and
investigate. We've already run our tool across the entire history of reviews on
Steam, identifying many reasons why games have seen periods of anomalous review
activity, and off-topic review bombs appear to only be a small number of them.

Once our team has identified that the anomalous activity is an off-topic review
bomb, we'll mark the time period it encompasses and notify the developer. The
reviews within that time period will then be removed from the Review Score
calculation. As before, the reviews themselves are left untouched - if you want
to dig into them to see if they're relevant to you, you'll still be able to do
so. To help you do that, we've made it clear when you're looking at a store page
where we've removed some reviews by default, and we've further improved the UI
around anomalous review periods.

Finally, we've also enabled you to opt out of this entirely, if that's your
preference - there's now a checkbox in your Steam Store options where you can
choose to have off-topic review bombs still included in all the Review Scores
you see.

While we're working on some other features around User Reviews, we thought this
one was worth shipping by itself. As always, if you have thoughts or concerns,
feel free to voice them in the comments below.